Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.

Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.